Preserved Wook is an oldtime New England railway engineman who calls to life again the history & technology not only of the steam locomotive in the LAST Steam Age of the Old Atlantic West, but of many a wonderful way of getting around in the World, in a better time when travel indeed was for the few…and the very few!

Boiling Away To Beat Hell!

Here are YouTube clips from two fine pieces of digital work, by Skip Weythman. The first is an extended take, of UP Northern 844, with her “Corn Belt Rocket” drag, hurtling eastbound in 2007 from Cheyenne to Sydney, NB, rightdown my old BN tie gang #978 Summer, 1979, hammer grounds:

The interesting feature is the way the digital feed CANNOT accurately record the rods and drivers. There are two to four tons of steel in the rods, and they reverse the horizontal direction of the whole mass eleven to twelve times per second. In the old movie film days, you would see for example the stagecoach wheels seeming to go backwards, because of cell lag. Here, mostly, the wheels incredibly just STOP every few seconds.

ANOTHER fine near miss by Mr William “Bill” (Jefferson?) Gates and his curious crew of quick-patch artists, may God save ALL us fool baby boomers from a well deserved basting and frying in Hell, and our just incompetent deserts….